Stomach
by abetternameneeded
Summary: Alice's lonliness starts to affect her body. TW: bodily fluids.


Everything was different. Everything. She could hear the trees moving around outside her window as she fought with the night holding her as its hostage with every waking moment she should be asleep during. The nightmares and the sleep depervation were getting to her. The pain in her head from straining to find a way to feel less alone was starting to drive her mad. The outside of her tower reminding her of what she couldn't have. It wasn't fair. Papa had told her it wasn't fair. And now he was gone and he couldn't make her feel better.

_"I know , Starfish. I know it's not fair."_ he had lulled her cries of frustration so many times before that she could hear it in her mind even with him gone but it wasn't the same. She needed him. He was all she had. He was the only person she'd ever met. And she couldn't leave her home that doubled as a prison. And the longer papa was gone the less it felt like home and the more it felt like a cage.

She was so frustrated with her situation. It wasn't fair and it wasn't right but she was trapped and who knew how much longer she would be. She wasn't sleeping very well. She needed to eat. It was hard doing this without papa. Everything was hard without him. But she was trying to be brave, like the characters in the stories papa told her. He was a brave pirate that did some things he wasn't proud of but he was so brave. She missed him. Alice sighed she just wanted to be with him. It was bad enough being trapped when papa was there to help her but now it was even worse.

Alice had been living off of sandwhiches. They didn't require her actually cooking and lately she didn't feel like doing much of anything besides pacing around the tower desperatley trying to think of any way she could free herself or watching outside the window and wondering what papa was doing. Cooking was a lot of effort without papa and she couldn't bring herself to do it as often as he had. She decided that she'd try to make something this time. Anything besides a sandwhich she'd eaten dozens of those in the last week. She started reading the instructions of the recipe to herself. Her voice startled her at first, the tower was so quiet without having papa nearby. She managed it, it may not have been as good as papa's but it was food. And she was bloody proud of herself for getting through that. She glanced at the mess she'd made in the kitchen. She let out a sigh. She didn't mind cleaning but she was getting tired. She hadn't slept in days, which had quickly become her normal routine, she'd stay up for days and then fall alseep whenever she could. Alice yawned. She needed to sleep. The kitchen could wait. She scoffed, of course it could wait where did she need to be? She couldn't go anywhere.

Alice laid down in her bed and her exhaustion made it easy to hum herself to sleep. She knew the words to the lullabye she was humming but she couldn't bring herself to sing them. She missed papa too much and if she sang she'd miss him even more. She let a few tears fall before she slept. Gods she missed papa.

She woke up not long after falling asleep. She wanted to sleep more but she couldn't. She finally got around to cleaning the kitchen. Or trying to. It was supposed to be fun. But it wasn't. Cleaning used to be filled with mutinies and laughter now it was filled with the sound of her footsteps and moving things around but otherwise it was silent. There was no papa telling her the towel needed to be rescued from a rival ship like a princess kidnapped by a crew. There was no Alice asking papa for help and him making a game of it and making her laugh. Alice picked up the single dish in the sink and put it away. Everything had its place. Alice slid down into the floor and thought about the fact she only had the one dish to put away. There should have been two. And then the quiet was replaced by the sounds of her sobs. It was too bloody much. It hurt. And as she cried she started to feel a pain in her stomach.

"Ow," she voiced her pain. She always had. Papa always let her tell him anything she wanted. But papa wasn't hear and her stuffed animals and her dolls could only listen to her cries and her saying she was in pain. They couldnt do anything about it. Her stomach hurt. Maybe she'd eaten something weird? That was a thing that could happen, wasn't it? Alice sighed. She'd lay down until the pain went away. And it went awayy for a moment and then she felt something rising from her stomch to her chest that then poured out of her mouth and right onto her bed.

"What the bloody hell?"

Alice had never seen or felt anything like this. It had come out of her but it looked weird. It looked like whatever she ate had left her body and landed on her bed and the floor inside a dark colored liquid. She'd look up what it was in a book but she couldn't deal with it right now. She just couldn't. She had to clean up the mess first. She walked around the tower and found a towel and some water and cleaned it up. She'd wash the sheets later. It wasn't like she'd be sleeping that night, anyway. But it was okay. She could handle this.

She flipped through her books and eventually found a few pages in one that explained what vomit was. It could be for a number of reasons. She'd avoid making what she made. And so she stuck to sanwhiches again. And then she'd try to cook once she realized eating just one food didn't make the problem any better. She still would get a pain in her stomach, sometime after crying, sometimes not that would end with vomit. She started to know what it felt like and could easily avoid it going all over the bed causing her more problems. And once she left the tower it stopped.

Many many years later she was sitting with Robin and they were talking and Robin was telling her about the time she'd gotten food poisoning from her own cooking.

"I used to vomit a lot," Alice added not finding anything weird or embarrasing about it as she didn't most things. "It stopped when I left the tower."

Robin's eyes went wide. She'd never thought about the physical impact that the isolation might have had on Alice. The lonliness must have hurt both emotionally and physically. "It hurt less than being alone."

Robin hugged Alice. She needed that physical assurance someone was there. "You're not alone now, you've got me."

Alice smiled. She had Robin. And that was amazing. She wished she could be near papa but Robin made it better and made her feel so much less alone.


End file.
